How the Internet police mounted an international effort against "The Cache."

On the morning of September 10, 2008, US Postal Inspector Lori Heath had assembled a Baltimore team to raid the ramshackle Independence Street home of a suspected Internet child pornography kingpin. They got an early start; with help from local cops, Heath put the house under surveillance at 6:00am. By 8:30am, the full twelve-person group of postal inspectors, digital forensics specialists, and police officers was in position, but they couldn’t act—Heath was stalled down at the District Court, still waiting to get her search warrant signed. Without it, the raid was on hold.

The target was Roger Lee Loughry Sr., a fiftysomething mechanic with a high-school education, a handlebar mustache, and a love for motorcycles. Heath, in constant communication with her team back on Independence Street, wanted her warrant before Loughry got spooked by the surveillance. While she waited, Loughry stepped out into the morning air, unkempt hair hanging to his shoulders. To ensure he didn’t leave the property, the surveillance team broke from their vehicles and detained him next to his home.

At 9:00am, federal Magistrate Judge Beth Gesner signed off on the search warrant. Heath called her team immediately and they took Loughry back inside his home. Heath herself arrived shortly, crossed the dirt driveway, and let herself into the yard through the chain-link gate in the front fence.

A note on sourcing

This feature is excerpted, in slightly modified form, from the new book The Internet Police: How Crime Went Online, and the Cops Followed by Ars deputy editor Nate Anderson. It can currently be purchased as a hardback (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or local bookstores) or as an e-book (Amazon, iTunes, Barnes & Noble, or Google Play).

The main source material for the piece was the hundreds of pages of transcripts detailing the trial of Roger Loughry in USA v. Savigar et al.—the Southern District of Indiana case used to prosecute most of The Cache defendants—along with other court documents and interviews with the lawyers involved. Full footnotes are available in the book.

The warrant team sat Loughry on a living room couch just to the right of the front door, then spent an hour and forty minutes combing the house. The vinyl-sided home was dilapidated; Heath’s inspectors went two steps down into the basement, but the stairs were so rickety that she worried someone might fall through. Most of the time was spent on the second floor where Loughry had his bedroom, a home office, and his computer. The agents were seeking information that could tie Loughry to an Internet message board called “The Cache,” a major site where members shared links to child pornography. The government had already penetrated the board’s security and so knew the online “handles” of its members. The site’s leader went by “DAS,” while Loughry was suspected to be a co-administrator named “Mayorroger.”

In addition to all the electronic evidence they collected, agents also discovered a scrap of paper with a cryptic address fragment scrawled in the lower right corner. Turning it over, they saw another notation: “Mr. D.A. Savigar, [house number redacted], Leyland, Preston, Lancashire, United Kingdom, PR251AH.” It was the address for one Delwyn A. Savigar—whose initials spelled out “DAS”—and who was at that moment being arrested by the Lancashire Constabulary. Convinced now that she had the right guy, Heath went downstairs to speak with Loughry.

Loughry was willing to talk without a lawyer present, and he freely admitted to using the Mayorroger screen name for all sorts of online accounts; he had chosen it in the wake of a failed 1999 bid for mayor of Baltimore. He then volunteered that he was an admin for a site called The Cache—before Heath had even mentioned the name. Loughry claimed the position was just an “honorary” one, however; what most interested him about the site was a simple arcade game called “Army Corps.” And what harm was there in that?

Heath had done her research, though; she pointed out that The Cache had actually dropped support for the game some time ago. She asked Loughry about child pornography on the site. He “figured” such material was being traded on the board, he said, but claimed that he had worked to stop its spread. “The only functions I performed there was I banned people for posting child pornography,” he wrote in a signed statement at the end of this interview. “I did click the links to see their posts and then banned them... My understanding of ‘The Cache’ was they had adult porn and games. I have since left the site.” He told Heath that viewing child pornography was a “sickness”—and unlike every other man swept up in Cache-related raids across the US, Loughry refused to plead guilty. He wanted his trial.

As a government lawyer would later put it, “We expect his essential defense in substance to be, I was only an administrator of an adult porn game board, ‘The Cache.’ I didn’t know. I didn’t intend to do any of the things that the other people are doing.” The government didn’t buy it. Would a jury?

Operation Joint Hammer

The long road to Loughry’s run-down Baltimore home stretched back to Australia, where in 2006 a Queensland investigator came across a video of child sex abuse. Investigators routinely scrutinize such videos after seizure, looking for any scrap of evidence—a school logo, a poster—that might help identify either child or abuser. The Australian video depicted a man and a young girl who spoke with a Flemish accent. Queensland police therefore passed the video to counterparts half a world away in Belgium.

Incredibly, the Europeans found the man shown in the video—a father who was raping his two daughters. The man led police to the forty-two-year-old Italian photographer who had taped the abuse. The photographer had set up a studio in the Ukraine, where he produced child pornography and ran a website from which he sold more than 150 homemade creations. (The site masqueraded as a legitimate child modeling site; a secret, password-protected section contained the illicit content.)

The photographer was soon arrested by Italian police, and the real breakthrough came when investigators found his archive of 50,000 e-mails from potential customers scattered across 28 countries. The cops suddenly had more leads than they could handle. Europol, the regional version of the international police coordination organization Interpol, put together detailed planning sessions at The Hague for what was now known as Operation Koala. Police from across Europe got involved, eventually using the e-mail addresses to identify 2,500 individuals; they then launched coordinated raids in 19 countries and arrested hundreds of suspects.

Europol headquarters in the Netherlands.

Europol

While Europe planned its crackdown, Europol sent a copy of the e-mail list to US officials, who found that the United States had the dubious distinction of originating 11,000 of the messages. The FBI could turn only 700 of these into “workable investigative leads,” but even pursuing that many individuals was itself a huge job that required massive federal resources.

Operation Joint Hammer was born. When US Attorney General Michael Mukasey finally revealed Joint Hammer at a press conference in December 2008, 60 US residents had just been arrested, including a New Jersey man who pled guilty to “producing sexual images of his nine-year-old daughter” and an Arizona fifth-grade teacher eventually accused of “sexual contact with female students at his school.”

That might not sound like a large haul after the application of so many resources, but the Europol e-mails had set in motion a complex series of investigations that ran for years—indeed, as of 2013, they remain ongoing. Joint Hammer provided a new entryway into the shadowy child pornography subculture, where users built relationships of trust with one another, took pains to use security measures, and operated on small boards that did not advertise their existence. In such cases, simply knowing that a particular child porn board existed was half the battle; such sites might operate in secrecy for years. But many users had accounts on multiple boards, so cracking one site often led to the next, which led to the one after that.

With Joint Hammer, the pattern held. In 2007, a US postal inspector named Jeffrey Arney was following up on some of the Joint Hammer e-mails when he interviewed an Alabama suspect who was a member of several boards. The man eventually turned over his online identity to the inspector, offering up his e-mail accounts, his usernames, and his passwords, including credentials to a site known only as The Cache. Suddenly, the feds had a new site name—and a way inside.

members had to copy the link, paste it into a Web browser, and correct it by hand

Visitors to The Cache accessed it by visiting thecachebbs.com and saw nothing beyond a simple login screen asking for a username and password. Signing up for a new account required approval from an administrator, and such access wasn’t given out easily. But with access to the informant’s account—his username on The Cache was “Retard”—authorities bypassed the login barrier and took a look around.

At first glance, the view was unremarkable. Like most online forums, The Cache hosted numerous text-based discussion sections, including sections on politics and sports. It also explicitly banned child pornography; indeed, this was rule number one. The Cache demanded that users “not request, offer, and/or post child pornography” and went on to add that “violation of this rule will result in an immediate ban, and your law enforcement agency will be notified of the infraction.” An entire subsection of the rules spelled out what constituted “CP” in tremendous detail—”no dildos or sex toys even if it is not used. This can include a girl suggestively sucking a cucumber or other phallic symbol. You get the idea?”

But the child porn ban didn’t mean The Cache was a wholesome place. Instead, the rules were apparently driven by a particular definition of “child pornography” as hard-core sex acts. The site banned those but trafficked in all sorts of other images and videos, mostly of young children posed to display their genitals for the camera. (Federal law makes such “lascivious exhibition” material illegal, despite the distinction drawn by The Cache.)

Users were cautioned to “always surf safe. Have your Internet settings at the highest settings. Take caution when surfing the links.” Members would be “pruned” from the board if they didn’t participate regularly, which included posting material—but not directly to The Cache. Members instead compressed videos and pictures, slapped innocent-sounding names on them, applied passwords, then uploaded them to anonymous file-hosting sites across the Internet. They would then post only a link to this material on The Cache while also providing the file password in bold letters.

The investigation spread from Australia to Europe to the US.

FBI

The links they provided couldn’t be clicked; they were purposely defective. Users were told to prefix links with “hxxp://” instead of the normal Web prefix “http://” This made links impossible to click on accidentally and also provided The Cache with some protection. Any link clicked on directly from a website generates a “referrer” ID that the linked website can read and record; if Cache members began clicking on links directly from the board, third-party sites or police might one day have an easy-to-assemble list of things that Cache members were downloading. Instead, members had to copy the link, paste it into a Web browser, and correct it by hand—thereby removing The Cache’s referral.

As Postal Inspector Arney looked around the site, he found such things as a “nude” gallery, which was further subdivided into an “18+” nude gallery, a “13-to-18” nude gallery, and an “under-13” nude gallery. Following the links and using the passwords revealed the material being traded. With 1,000 members at its height, The Cache was a big deal. It was such a big deal that the government soon spun The Cache probe off from Joint Hammer and into something new: Operation Nest Egg.

Secondary distribution is deeply distasteful, and there are arguments over how much it may drive some of the supply side; but surely criminal acts that produce immediate harm are rather more serious than mere distribution of copies (especially furtive distribution, which, unlike garden-variety revenge-porn pic leaking is done as quietly as possible, rather than as part of a widespread harassment campaign).

While I'll grant child porn gets used as a scare tactic (e.g. the Australian proposed law wherein it would be child porn if the subject even looked under 18; talk about subjective), I do like seeing CP rings smashed like this.

However, IMO, it actually reinforces the lack of need for new laws, and ISP-based firewalls, etc. The tools are obviously in place, and were well-used in this situation.

360 months for this? He deserves far more. Anybody who deals in child pornography should be jailed for life, no exceptions. One of the worst crimes, really.

Aside from fff's comment, remember that prison is worse for child molestors (and I bet this includes those in just for child porn) than anyone else. Even the absolute scum of the prison system hate those people.

[Edit]Am I the only one that finds the sidebars and topic headings atrocious?

30 years is insane for such a crime, especially for someone without a criminal record. He is a pervert and needs to be punished for his action, but locking him up for the rest of his life (with taxpayer money) is not remotely proper.

You can get away with 2nd degree murder for less than a decade, he should get 6,7 years tops.

I know that while there are those who have reservations against long prison sentences for those who merely watch/possess child pornography, viewing and/or possessing child pornography remains prohibited in most countries and is punished with heft prison sentences. Most people should be smart in terms of obeying that law.

Plus, with what we can glean from the NSA spying scandal, there is no real privacy on the Internet. Privacy on the Internet is a delusion. Be careful of what you say and what you do on the Internet, for it could come back to bite you in the ass, even if the government doesn't arrest you over it.

Redacting the street name and house number is a bit of a waste of time if you're going to leave the postcode intact -- that's enough to narrow it down to about a dozen houses. Anyone wanting to burn the place down would only need to call into a local library and look up the names on the electoral roll to find out which was the right one to torch.

Aside from fff's comment, remember that prison is worse for child molestors (and I bet this includes those in just for child porn) than anyone else. Even the absolute scum of the prison system hate those people.

First, I'm glad the guy was busted and is going to prison. Second, this is what really gets to me. The prosecution, the judge, and everyone else knows what will happen to this man in jail. That means that on some level, they are complicit in the abuse. I don't see how this is right.

Also, I don't agree that you get to complain about the costs of incarceration. When you deprive a man of his liberty lawfully, you then become responsible for his care. That care costs money. If you deem that the cost is too much, then you must either provide humane care for less (if possible) or choose not to incarcerate as many people or incarcerate for shorter durations.

30 years is insane for such a crime, especially for someone without a criminal record. He is a pervert and needs to be punished for his action, but locking him up for the rest of his life (with taxpayer money) is not remotely proper.

You can get away with 2nd degree murder for less than a decade, he should get 6,7 years tops.

For what it's worth, our system tends to throw the book at people who choose to fight the charges against them and lose. Odds are if he had pled guilty and not gone to trial he would have gotten a substantially lower sentence. Not saying that this is right, but given the evidence against him choosing to fight the charges was probably not the best idea.

30 years is insane for such a crime, especially for someone without a criminal record. He is a pervert and needs to be punished for his action, but locking him up for the rest of his life (with taxpayer money) is not remotely proper.

You can get away with 2nd degree murder for less than a decade, he should get 6,7 years tops.

I'm not sure what the right sentence would be, but this isn't just a guy who downloaded some pictures off the 'net. He helped run a forum that existed for the purpose of distributing the pictures. He's pretty far down the list of people whose sentence I'd complain about.

That sentence is crazy long. Actual rapist and murderers do less time.

Society as a whole would be better served with a short (one to three year) sentence and then mandated treatment in a half way house. And, not one of the for profit ones that exist just to overcharge people and get them back in the system.

Treatment should be the preferred option for those who have not raped or otherwise directly harmed a child.

there's some credence to distributors and even just "viewers" creating enough of a market that their culpability is worth punishing. there's also some credence to the statistics of viewing and distributing leading to physical acts.

I often see this asserted, but there is very little evidence for it.

There is an equally valid argument that an alternative form of gratification will result in fewer cases of child molestation, and since very little scientific study has been done on the topic, we can argue until we're blue in the face and never reach an agreement. I would point out however, that the thousandfold increase in adult pornography available to the average person over the last two decades has not seen a significant increase in rape statistics. Why would child pornography be different?

I hope those investigators that have to investigate that data don't have kids.What i don't understand is why the smut on "the cache" was not used in the prosecution

I'm friends with a former California detective who investigated child pornography cases. He has children, and it was very difficult. I imagine investigators stay in child pornography groups for only so long before they get out (probably on par with human photo filters that work for Facebook, MySpace, etc). It requires a mental toughness that you don't find every day.

[First, I'm glad the guy was busted and is going to prison. Second, this is what really gets to me. The prosecution, the judge, and everyone else knows what will happen to this man in jail. That means that on some level, they are complicit in the abuse. I don't see how this is right.

It's not right. It's just another failing of the judicial system in this country, but nothing will be done about it because no one wants to be seen as having sympathy for murderers and molesters, and DAs like to be able to use that threat of prison brutality to extract plea deals from accused sex offenders, which gives them easy convictions to put on their record.

there's some credence to distributors and even just "viewers" creating enough of a market that their culpability is worth punishing. there's also some credence to the statistics of viewing and distributing leading to physical acts.

I often see this asserted, but there is very little evidence for it.

There is an equally valid argument that an alternative form of gratification will result in fewer cases of child molestation, and since very little scientific study has been done on the topic, we can argue until we're blue in the face and never reach an agreement. I would point out however, that the thousandfold increase in adult pornography available to the average person over the last two decades has not seen a significant increase in rape statistics. Why would child pornography be different?

I really wish more science were done on this subject.

What alternative form? And also what about escalation? In other words whatever substitute one comes up with will the person be satisfied with it long term, or need ever stronger stimulus?

Well, the push in recent years to outlaw cartoon pornography that depicts those who "appear underage" seems ludicrous on first amendment grounds. And I'm not sure that I agree that escalation is a reasonable expectation in many cases, I haven't been on a date in a few years, but am unlikely to rape anyone as a result.

30 years is insane for such a crime, especially for someone without a criminal record. He is a pervert and needs to be punished for his action, but locking him up for the rest of his life (with taxpayer money) is not remotely proper.

You can get away with 2nd degree murder for less than a decade, he should get 6,7 years tops.

I'm not sure what the right sentence would be, but this isn't just a guy who downloaded some pictures off the 'net. He helped run a forum that existed for the purpose of distributing the pictures. He's pretty far down the list of people whose sentence I'd complain about.

But he didn't actually deal physical harm, which rapists and murderers do.

He also didn't participate in creating the actual content distributed - though making videos for himself is just as perverted, it's not the same level of legal offense.

I can't argue against using him as an example to make others hesitate at using child porn sites, though. Tough luck for the asshole.

The sentence range is looked up on a table, indexed by "Offence Level" (a value from 1 to 43, based on the severity of the crime), and a "Criminal History Index" (based on the offender's criminal history).

He was accused of helping run a major child porn distribution site. That sounds to me like "Trafficking in the sexual exploitation of a minor", which is covered in part 2G2.2 of the guidelines. The "base offence level" is 18 if convicted of 4 specific crimes, 22 otherwise. None of the 4 specific crimes sound like what he was accused of. So, base of 22.

There are modifiers. The ones which seem to apply based on the story are: Material involving prepubescent minor under 12, +2; Distribution for the receipt of a thing of value, but not money (like, other pictures), +5; use of a computer, +2; 600 or more images, +5. That's a total of +14, bringing the offense level up to 36. He was also in an "aggravating role", in that he was an "organizer or leader of a criminal activity that involved 5 or more people", which gives another +4 (+3 if he was a manager or supervisor, but not organizer or leader). Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and use the +3. That brings it up to offense level 39.

He had a criminal history. It doesn't take much to get bumped into Criminal History Category II or greater. The sentence range for Offense Level 39, Criminal History Category II is 295-365 months. For Criminal History Category IV (which could be as little as 4 misdemeanor convictions), the range is 360 months to life. Assuming this was a first conviction, the guidelines would be 262-327 months. If the courts felt his role as long-term admin on the site was equivalent to an organizer or leader, then even without his criminal history he would have gotten 295-365 months.

there's some credence to distributors and even just "viewers" creating enough of a market that their culpability is worth punishing. there's also some credence to the statistics of viewing and distributing leading to physical acts.

I often see this asserted, but there is very little evidence for it.

There is an equally valid argument that an alternative form of gratification will result in fewer cases of child molestation, and since very little scientific study has been done on the topic, we can argue until we're blue in the face and never reach an agreement. I would point out however, that the thousandfold increase in adult pornography available to the average person over the last two decades has not seen a significant increase in rape statistics. Why would child pornography be different?

I really wish more science were done on this subject.

What alternative form? And also what about escalation? In other words whatever substitute one comes up with will the person be satisfied with it long term, or need ever stronger stimulus?

Because that theory works so well for violent films, books, and video games? Actual criminal statistics would seem to indicate otherwise. Violent crime is at near record lows, yet there is plenty of violent media available.

So please point us to a well sited, peer reviewed study indicating that pornography ( of any sort) is different from violent media.

For me the most poignant section of the article is that the victims will never be able to truly put this behind them. They will live every day of their life knowing people are out there actively distributing photos/videos from humiliating and gut-wrenchingly painful experiences. That would be extremely challenging. I hope some of them have the strength to mentally rise above it, but I doubt all of them could.

You have got to love the subtle propaganda at the beginning of the article about how the valiant agent had to wait exasperated for a signed warrant.

Why not secure the warrant then assemble the team, Rambimbo? If you worried your take down team would "spook him" why not take care of the legality before placing a team onsite?

That's not propaganda, that's what happened you sexist twit.

While the "Rambimbo" is certainly over the line and uncalled for, I can see the greater point he is trying to make.

The warrant should have been gotten first, and then send in the investigators. The investigation was ongoing for months so there was no reason to think that it could not have waited one more day, or even till the afternoon.

I am just glad they did not do one of the classical no-knock 3 am raids and shoot his dog like is so common. They at least waited for daytime.